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Former Facebook employee and current enfant terrible of high finance Chamath Palihapitiya is making news again with a $1.3 billion twofer SPAC and PIPE deal into the solar energy financing company, Sunlight Financial.
Sunlight Financial is essentially a lending company that gives solar installers a way to provide loans to homeowners to finance solar power and battery installations and other home improvement projects.
While it may be another indication of the Roaring ’20s come back to haunt global financial markets in the lead-up to a catastrophic meltdown of the global financial system, there’s at least some method to the madness with Sunlight.
That’s because there’s a lot of tailwinds behind a business that’s lending money to provide better access to solar power, energy storage and energy efficiency upgrades.
The investment, alongside Coatue, Franklin Templeton and BlackRock, will value the lender at $1.3 billion. A healthy figure, but one that’s not astronomical, especially given the $705 million in financing that Sunlight Financial has raised over its history, according to Crunchbase.
As Alex Wilhelm noted earlier today, Sunlight Financial would have likely tapped public markets sooner or later, given a pretty solid financial performance — even during the pandemic:
Looking at the numbers, it’s somewhat clear that the company could have gone public in a year or two; another year’s growth, and it would have had enough revenue to pursue a traditional debut. Via this SPAC-led deal it will get out sooner and have more cash while it scales. Perhaps that is the value of the SPAC here for Sunlight.
Sunlight also has the benefit of being a publicly traded renewable energy play at a time when those companies are in short supply and high demand from institutional investors.
Over the course of 2020, big money moved to find ways to support businesses that can help mitigate the effects of climate change or slow the rapidly warming temperatures on the planet.
“Industry commitments to mitigate climate change risk is providing investors with visibility that there is momentum among decision-makers to drive change,” said Richard Manley, the managing director and head of sustainable investing at CPP Investments, in an interview last year. “There’s an appreciation within the public markets that the exciting transition solutions either within core operating subsidiaries or investments in the VC arms of corporate companies haven’t provided public equity investors the really focused opportunities they’ve wanted.”
With the launch of Palihapitiya’s latest SPAC, that trend seems set to continue in 2021. As Rob Day, a longtime investor in climate tech wrote in a direct message late last year:
“[The] current wave [of SPACs] is because over the past 24 months the institutional investor universe has come fully into believing that climate solutions are going to be a major growth area in the 2020s and beyond, but they weren’t seeing options available to them for investing into,” according to Day.
“The available publicly traded ‘green’ companies were already getting really bought up, and the private equity options were underwhelming as well (smallish in the case of VC, low returns in the case of large-format projects). Throw in a Robinhood market of retail investors with a lot of enthusiasm for EVs and such, and you have a nice recipe for this to happen.”
In a year defined by economic and civil unrest, it should come as little surprise that workplace organizing has been on the upswing. The COVID-19 pandemic in particular (coupled with the ever-present effects of late capitalism) has brought long-standing questions of employment stability and safety to the forefront of many.
Of course, much of this dates to well before the pandemic was in full swing. In February, we noted that both scooter startup Spin and food delivery service Instacart voted to unionize. That same month, Kickstarter became one of the most prominent tech companies to form a union, with online code collaboration tool Glitch following suit in March.
Work place organizing is a broad and expansive topic in the world of technology. It’s a concept that is beginning to take hold in a diverse array of workplaces, ranging from contractors and factory workers at places like Amazon to salaried office jobs.
Tech workers unionize
The subject was a no-brainer for this year’s TC Sessions: Justice on March 3, and we’ve pulled together some great speakers to discuss their experiences, while giving some guidance to those interested in potentially organizing at their own workplaces.
Clarissa Redwine is a fellow at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy. A former senior design and technology outreach lead at Kickstarter, she now hosts Kickstarter Union Oral History, a series of interviews with union organizers. Grace Reckers is the lead Northeastern union organizer for the OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International Union). Parul Koul, who joined Google as a software engineer in 2019, is the executive chair of the Alphabet Workers.
Learn and discuss workplace organizing at TC Sessions: Justice on March 3. Grab a ticket to join the conversation!
As Google’s Privacy Sandbox remains under scrutiny over competition concerns, the tech giant has released an update claiming experimental ad-targeting techniques it’s developing as part of the plan to depreciate support for third party cookies on its Chrome browser show results that are “nearly as effective as cookie-based approaches”.
Google has been working on a technique — called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) — to target ads based on clustering users into groups with similar interests, which it claims is superior from a privacy perspective vs the current (dysfunctional) ‘norm’ of targeting individuals based on third parties tracking everything they do online.
It wants FLoCs to enable interest-based advertising to continue after it ends support for third party trackers.
However the proposal has alarmed advertisers who argue it’s anti-competitive. And earlier this month the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation of the Privacy Sandbox proposal after complaints from a coalition of digital marketing companies and others from newspapers and technology companies alleging Google is abusing a dominant position by depreciating support for third party trackers.
On the privacy front Google’s self-styled Privacy Sandbox isn’t exactly attracting effusive plaudits, either.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has, for example, dubbed FLoCs “the opposite of privacy-preserving technology” — warning in 2019 that the approach is akin to a “behavioral credit score”. It said then that the proposals risk sustaining discrimination against vulnerable groups of people, whose online activity would be pattern-matched with others without their say-so; and could also lead to leaking sensitive info about them to third parties — without offering web users any way to escape being put in a ‘interest based’ ad targeting bucket.
With objections piling up from on sides of the aisle (advertiser vs user) — and now active regulatory scrutiny of the competition issue — Google has its work cut out to sell its preferred replacement for tracking cookies to all the relevant stakeholders. Though advertisers (and competition regulators) currently seem front of mind for the tech giant.
In an update about the Privacy Sandbox proposals today, Google appears to be hoping to alleviate advertisers’ concerns that the demise of tracking cookies will degrade their ability to lucratively target Internet users — writing that tests of the FLoC technology suggest advertisers will continue to see “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising”.
It’s not clear how much test data was involved in Google generating that percentage, however. (We asked and Google did not have an immediate response.) So there’s zero meat on the bone of the ‘95% minimum’ claim.
Its spokesman did note that it will be opening up public testing in March — and expects advertisers to join in kicking FLoC’s tires then. So there’s clearly going to be more detail to come on this front.
“Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release in March and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2,” writes Chetna Bindra, group product manager for user trust and privacy in the blog post, adding: “If you’d like to get a head start, you can run your own simulations (as we did) based on the principles outlined in this FLoC whitepaper.”
It’s unsurprisingly that Google continues to emphasize the relative openness with which it’s developing the Privacy Sandbox proposals — as that may help it fight antitrust accusations. But it’s also noteworthy being as the adtech industry, which has been fighting to block/delay its depreciation of third party cookies, is busy spinning up its own contenders to replace trackers — and developing those competing proposals typically with a lot less transparency than Google.
Nonetheless, Google seems a whole more comfortable quantifying FLoC’s potential impact on ad revenue (tiny, per its latest claim) vs articulating what privacy gains Internet users might expect from the proposed shift from individual tracking to run behavioral ads to being stuck in labelled buckets to run behavioral ads.
Google’s blog post has a few fuzzy mentions — like “viable privacy-first alternatives” and ‘hiding individuals “in the crowd”’ — but there’s no metric or data offered on how much privacy users stand to gain if its preferred post-cookie future comes to pass.
Test results it published in October also focused on seeking to demonstrate to advertisers that FLoCs can deliver on other relevant ad metrics. Funnily enough, Internet users’ privacy — and what happens when degrees of privacy are lost — is rather harder for Google’s computer scientists to measure.
"advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising". What's the per cent of privacy improvement? #GDPR #DigitalServicesAct #ePrivacy
— Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) January 25, 2021
“The idea is to make it so that no one can reconstruct your cross-site browsing history,” said the company’s spokesman when we asked about how the proposal will improve users’ privacy standing.
“We’re trying to address non-transparent forms of tracking, across websites, with privacy-safe mechanisms for consumers, and make it so it can’t happen. And to do so while still enabling opportunity and fair compensation for publishers and advertisers. So it’s really not even a matter of trying to approximate a kind of privacy: We’re trying to address a root critical concern of users, full stop,” he added.
FLoCs are just one part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals. The company is working on a slew of aligned efforts to simultaneously replace various other key components of the adtech ecosystem. And it gives an overview of some of these in the blog post — covering proposals for (post-cookie) conversation measurement; ad-fraud prevention; and anti-fingerprinting.
Here it dwells briefly on retargeting/remarketing — referring to a new Chrome proposal (called Fledge) that it says it’s considering for a ‘trusted server’ model “specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets”. This will also be made available for advertisers to test later this year, Google adds.
“Over the last year, several members of the ad tech community have offered input for how this might work, including proposals from Criteo, NextRoll, Magnite and RTB House. Chrome has published a new proposal called FLEDGE that expands on a previous Chrome proposal (called TURTLEDOVE) and takes into account the industry feedback they’ve heard, including the idea of using a ‘trusted server’ — as defined by compliance with certain principles and policies — that’s specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets. Chrome intends to make FLEDGE available for testing through origin trials later this year with the opportunity for ad tech companies to try using the API under a “bring your own server” model,” it writes.
“Technology advancements such as FLoC, along with similar promising efforts in areas like measurement, fraud protection and anti-fingerprinting, are the future of web advertising — and the Privacy Sandbox will power our web products in a post-third-party cookie world,” it adds.
Discussing Fledge’s potential, Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent researcher and consultant, said there’s still a lot of uncertainty over how it might impact user privacy. “The Fledge experiment looks potentially interesting but it mixes in various proposals in this test. Such a mix would need to get a specific privacy assessment as the offered privacy qualities might be different than original claimed. Furthermore, the current tests will have many privacy precautions intended for the future, turned off initially. It will be tricky to gradually turn them on,” he told TechCrunch.
Twitter is launching what it calls “a community-based approach to misinformation.”
The Birdwatch project first came to light last fall thanks to product sleuth Jane Manchun Wong. Now Twitter has launched a pilot version via the Birdwatch website.
The goal, as explained in a blog post by Twitter’s Vice President of Product Keith Coleman, is to expand beyond the labels that the company already applies to controversial or potentially misleading tweets, which he suggested are limited to “circumstances where something breaks our rules or receives widespread public attention.”
Coleman wrote that the Birdwatch approach will “broaden the range of voices that are part of tackling this problem.” That has brings a broader range of perspectives to these issues and goes beyond the simple question of, “Is this tweet true or not?” It may also take some of the heat off Twitter for individual content moderation decisions.
Users can sign up on the Birdwatch site to flag tweets that they find misleading, add context via notes and rate the notes written by other contributors, based on whether they’re helpful or not. These notes will only be visible on the Birdwatch site for now, but it sounds like the company’s goal is to incorporate them to the main Twitter experience.
“We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable,” Coleman said. “Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.”
Given the potential for plenty of argument and back-and-froth on contentious tweets, it remains to be seen how Twitter will present these notes in a way that isn’t confusing or overwhelming, or how it can avoid weighing in on some of these arguments. The company said Birdwatch will use rank content based on algorithmic “reputation and consensus systems,” with the code shared publicly. (All notes contributed to Birdwatch will also be available for download.) You read more about the initial ranking system here.
“We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors,” Coleman said. “We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/25/twitters-birdwatch-fights-misinformation-with-community-notes/
TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.
Our survey of VCs in Stockholm, and Sweden generally, will capture how the country is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic.
The deadline is the end of this week.
We’d like to know how Sweden’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here.
Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. More than one partner is welcome to fill out the survey. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).
The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you can add, the better.
You can fill out the survey here.
Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.
What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions include: Which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?
This survey is part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.
https://techcrunch.com/extra-crunch/investor-surveys/
For example, here is the recent survey of London.
You are not in Sweden, but would like to take part? That’s fine! Any European VC investor can STILL fill out the survey, as we probably will be putting a call out to your country next anyway! And we will use the data for future surveys on vertical topics.
The survey is covering almost every country on in the Union for the Mediterranean, so just look for your country and city on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).
Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com
(Please note: Filling out the survey is not a guarantee of inclusion in the final published piece).
